The Pinboard

On The Pinboard you will find stories from the media and other sources that will interest and inform you.

If you come across a story that you think would interest us, about a 90 year old mountain climber for instance, email details or a link to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Mountain biking can be one of the scarier adventure sports … if you’ve never done it before. The close proximity of metal and bone doesn’t make a comfortable partnership especially when you’re hurtling round an uneven and rocky trail in a bike park. However, these two show that the answer to the question in the title, as with all the activities we cover, is definitely “NO!”

Most people, including ourselves, wouldn’t consider athletics an extreme sport, so we haven’t covered it a great deal on Silver Grey Sports Club. However, we came across this video of the final of the women’s 100m in the 50-54 age-group from the World Masters Athletics (WMA) meeting in Perth, Australia in 2016. Looking at these athletes you can have no doubt that the strength and fitness required for participating in age-group athletic competition does very much crossover with some of the ideas we believe in - that there is no age limit to keeping your body in exceptionally good shape and enjoying everything that being in the best physical shape brings with it.

Here are a few things to think about while, say, spending time running on a treadmill - better that than reading a newspaper while doing it!

We have reported on many studies that have shown that exercise is good for the brain as well as the body. Now a new study has suggested that something like the reverse is also true, that obesity is bad for your brain, specifically for the volume of the brain’s grey matter. Grey matter is a major constituent part of the brain and is important in areas of the brain involved in muscle control and sensory perception such as seeing and hearing, memory, emotions, speech, decision making, and self-control. Having less of it is not a good thing, and the research by Mark Hamer of Loughborough University and David Batty of University College London does appear to show that, as obesity increases, the brain’s grey matter takes the opposite route and gradually shrinks.

Worms in Space! What?! Yes, worms in Space! It sounds like a bad sci-fi movie but it is in fact a scientific experiment being prepared for by three well-respected English universities. So if you thought that Silver Grey Sports Club was somewhat obsessive in continually making so much fuss about the importance of muscles perhaps a government funded experiment sending worms into space specifically for research into what makes muscles atrophy, and how to avoid it will reassure you as to the importance of the issue!

Ray Wooley, aged 95, has set a new record for being the the world’s oldest scuba diver. And another thing? He broke his own previous record!

Ray set the record by diving for 45 minutes, exploring the wreck of the cargo ship Zenobia, near Larnaca , in Cyprus. He has been scuba diving for almost 60 years having been a radio operator during World War II, and then having served with the Special Boat Services.

We’ve done a lot of writing about how exercise can be the best way of ageing successfully. We’ve written about how exercise can be medicine. We’ve written about Superagers, who don’t suffer the usual decrepitude of ageing, even when examination shows that they have the physical symptoms that mean they should be suffering from dementia, for instance, but they aren’t. We’ve described exercise in age as the true fountain of youth and we don’t intend to stop now. Because there is even more evidence of the truth of this, in a new study which shows how exercise operates at a fundamental level within the body to alter the commonly accepted course of ageing.

As 82 year old Professor Norman Lazarus, a co-author of the report and at the same time a subject of it, said ”If exercise was a pill, everyone would be taking it”.

Recent Items

Triathlon is one of the most popular sports among Silver Grey athletes. The International Triathlon Union will soon be launching an age group section of their website. We'll let you know when it goes live.